Getting Started

Baldi's Basics Plus is a stealth roguelike that parodies 90s educational games: you collect notebooks across randomly generated school floors while Baldi hunts you by sound. A full Hide & Seek run is five floors long, and clearing all five in one run is the win condition. The game is a paid Early Access release for Windows, macOS and Linux.

The Core Loop on Every Floor

Each floor hides a set of notebooks inside classrooms. Every classroom has an activity attached, and solving it hands you the notebook. Answer correctly and Baldi pauses to praise you while your stamina refills; get it wrong and his ruler slaps faster as his speed climbs. Once every notebook is collected, the elevators reopen and glow green, and stepping into one and pressing the button inside the car ends the floor.

Baldi tracks you through noise. Doors, a closing storage locker, a missed jump in Playtime's jump rope and vent exits all tell him where you are. Sound travels around walls rather than through them, so a room with a single doorway makes every noise seem to come from that door. Reading those cues is the most important skill in the game.

• Notebooks sit behind classroom activities such as the Math Machine, Balloon Buster and Match Machine.
• Stamina drains while running and refills when you complete an activity correctly.
• YTPs are the points you earn and spend in Johnny's Store.
• Power tubes are your lives; the Play Style option decides how many you get.

Modes Available From the Menu

Hide & Seek is the main mode: five floors of rising difficulty, with lives and a shop between levels. Endless Mode asks how many notebooks you can collect before Baldi catches you, on a level type and size you pick from a level select menu. Field Trips can be launched from the menu to practice or chase high scores, and the interactive Tutorial teaches movement, items and activities with chalk boards that display your current key bindings.

The Hide & Seek menu holds the Play Style setting, challenge options and a seed field. Explorer mode lives here as a play style, and typing a seed lets you replay a specific generated run. Details on every floor type sit in the Hide & Seek floors guide.

Choosing a Play Style

Play Style	Power tubes	Best for
Normal	3 at the start of each floor	Learning routes and structures
Arcade	3 at the start of the run, none added later	Players who already finish runs
Strict	1 for the whole run	Mastery attempts

Losing every life sends you back to the beginning. Normal is the setting to learn on, because a mistake in a vent or a Factory belt room costs a single tube instead of the entire run.

The Pitstop Between Floors

After each floor the elevator drops you into the Pitstop, a small rest area with unlimited stamina where items cannot be used. It contains Johnny's Store, a storage locker that keeps up to three items between floors, a Save & Quit poster, the Packet-O-Matic for stickers and the bus for field trips. A chalkboard names the type of the next floor, which should shape every purchase. Skipping the Pitstop is done by turning around in the elevator and pressing its button again.

Johnny lets you buy an item when you are up to 100 YTPs short, once per game, and items can go on sale at random discounts. The full economy is covered in the items and YTPs guide, and a ready-made list lives on the Pitstop checklist.

Saving, Seeds and Continuing a Run

A run can be saved from the Save & Quit poster in the Pitstop and continued later from the main menu. When a saved game exists, the Hide & Seek menu offers a separate button for starting fresh, with a warning that the current save will be lost. Saves are erased only when a new game actually starts, not when you try another mode.

Every generated floor comes from a seed. Entering the same seed reproduces the same layout, which makes seeds useful for practicing a route or comparing runs with other players. Item loadouts are not tied to the seed, so items and their spots change each time a floor loads even on a familiar seed.

If the level generator ever fails, the game saves with a new seed and offers a return to the main menu instead of crashing, so a broken floor never costs a run.

First Habits That Keep Baldi Slow

Keep doors closed near Baldi, finish activities carefully instead of quickly and hold your best item for the last stretch of a floor. Hiding in a locker is not a guaranteed escape: if Baldi hears you climb in, he walks over and pulls you out.

Levels 1 to 3 run on time limits of 5, 7 and 9 minutes. When the clock hits zero the halls go dark, Baldi gradually speeds up and you are marked guilty for being in school after hours, so finishing notebooks early matters more than collecting every bonus question. The cast that complicates all of this is introduced on the school staff and troublemakers pages.